Popular site for downloading YouTube videos shuts down

KeepVid, a popular site for downloading YouTube videos, no longer works. The website still exists, but its only purpose now is educational.

“Video downloading from the Internet will become more and more difficult, and KeepVid encourages people to download videos via the correct and legal ways,” the site now proclaims.

A spokesperson for KeepVid has confirmed to TorrentFreak that people will no longer be able to use it to download videos.

Related: How Kodi crackdown efforts are being thwarted

Until this week, KeepVid had been a popular destination for people looking to rip clips off YouTube, Dailymotion, Facebook, Vimeo and other video sites, for them to watch offline… something that wouldn’t have gone down too well with those platforms, which make money through advertising and video views.

It isn’t yet clear who KeepVid was shut down by, but a rather sorry new copyright infringement-themed message has appeared on the About section of the service’s Facebook page, reading“It is prohibited to download the copyrighted contents from www.youtube.com and other similar websites (collectively referred to as YouTube) without their prior consent according to YouTube’s ‘Terms of Service’”.

The message also includes a YouTube link, which leads to a broken page.

The page has also posted a new status reading“KeepVid.com won’t provide video/audio downloading features from now on. We’ll develop better video & audio tools for you in the future. Thank you all for your kind support, and please stay tuned with us. If you have any questions, please contact: [email protected].”

The move, unsurprisingly, hasn’t gone down well with KeepVid users, who have posted a bunch of predictably angry comments in response.

How big a win is this for anti-piracy organisations? Share your thoughts @hmemar.